OpenAI and Google bet everything on AI assistants

AI. AI? AI! AI… AI This has been a week full of AI announcements from some of the biggest and most important technology companies, all of which seem completely convinced that we’re on the verge of a virtual assistant revolution. If Silicon Valley gets its way, you might never have to write an email, a line of code, or a joke again. All you’ll do is ask your all-knowing, ultra-helpful, maybe a little flirty virtual assistant, and it will do everything for you.

About this episode of The Vergecast, we discussed all the AI ​​assistant stuff that OpenAI announced at its Spring Update event and very similar things that Google announced at its I/O developer conference the next day. Since the early days of Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa, the technology industry has been moving towards the same goal. Are seductive AI assistants really the future of computing?

After that, we talked about the rest of Google I/O, which was just the Gemini show from start to finish. We try to understand the new general views of AI and what they will do to how the web works. They’re going to change things, there’s no doubt about that – the only thing left to discover is what’s on the other side.

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about laptops and emulators and self-driving cars and iPads and the undeniable ways the app model is changing. With a bunch of developer conferences coming up, there could be more changes in the works.

If you want to learn more about everything we discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started, starting with OpenAI:

And on everything else from Google I/O:

And in the lightning round: